Monkey Grip acquired its reputation partly because Garner refused to make any of this prettier than it was.

Set among Melbourne’s communal households in the 1970s, the novel follows Nora, a writer and single mother, through an increasingly consuming relationship with Javo, a heroin addict whose disappearances and returns begin to determine the emotional weather around her. Garner explores how women attempting to invent lives outside the conventional family, who discover that freedom does not magically abolish dependence, jealousy, childcare, money or attachment. The politics are so embodied. Somebody still has to sweep the floor, somebody is crying in the next room, somebody has borrowed the bike.

Melbourne appears through kitchens, baths, share houses, streets, markets, pools and bedrooms; desire is inseparable from logistics. First published in 1977 and once attacked for being too close to autobiography, Monkey Grip now looks like one of the foundational books of contemporary Australian writing precisely because Garner understood that ordinary life, recorded without embarrassment, was already serious material.